People who know me and know my experience with my Old's Cutty Supreme would probably expect GM to top this list, but the jury is still out on that one. My first car (the spotted avenger) was a Buick LeSabre that should have been laid to rest LONG before I ever had the chance to enjoy its duct-taped goodness, but for some reason continued to run despite me showing my friends that I could spin brand new tires. I have seen other GM cars hold up fairly well.
But there was one pretty serious computer company, and a second one just hit the list. The first motherboard I ever bought new in box was from MSI. It was right when MSI started to become a major player like abit, asus, tyan, etc. I bought the board, which had a disappointing chipset on it (that was VIA's fault, not MSI) and ended up RMAing it after a few months. Then the same thing happened again. Then again. Then my year was up. No product should break 3 times in a year. And bear in mind, this wasn't the same board, it was a replacement each time. There was obviously something wrong, and MSI didn't fix it. The guy at the shop I bought it from told me they had trouble with that board. That was the only motherboard that I have ever had just die when it was still well within its lifetime. (This is gussing a 3-5 year lifetime on computer hardware. Most stuff I have encountered has even done a good deal better than that, but most stuff isn't really considered modern after about a 3-5 year period.)
So there is a new one. I'll probably upload the sound file soon. I bought a SATA hard drive from Intrex in August of 2003. I actually sold an older WD 80gig to nick at that time (which is still running) and bought a Seagate 80gig 8mb buffer SATA drive. Recently I have been having some very strange issues, that I was pretty sure were drive related. No real lost data, just issues. I run iTunes a lot, and I would wake up in the middle of the night and a song was stuck in a 1 second loop. I have wierd freezes for short periods of time, and the real tell-tell sign was when the computer would reboot, and on rare occation, not find a device to boot off of. Then last night the problems got real bad. I was running Fedora and I was getting 5 minute freezes. That was when I started hearing not-so-good noises. I opened up the side of the case to hear better and sure enough it was a squeek followed by a thump, and coming from my hard drive. Shortly after, that, I couldn't even boot the machine. Because I had things to do before going to work, I left without trying to replace it and reload the machine. I stopped in at Intrex to see if they still had the reciept, which they did, and is how I know I got it in August of 03. The good news is that I had recently backed up everything. The only thing on the drive was a totally fresh install of Fedora.
So tonight, after moving some stuff around and getting a drive into the machine, I went to seagates site to check out my old drive, and see if it was one of the 3 year warrenties, or a 1 year. Seagate's site says
Out of Warranty
This drive is out of warranty with Seagate. Repair service for out of warranty products is available only to contracted customers.
Which means 1 year. And I'm not a contracted customer.
The end result is a very expensive paperweight.
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